At 6 a.m., we would awake to the squeaky roar of bulldozers. Opening our eyes, we’d see the hulking machines moving lazily back and forth on the construction site. At first, the only people on the site had been IDF soldiers and demolition crews, along with private security guards. But as time passed, more workers arrived: people to dig a trench to hold the fence and to drive the bulldozers that pushed stones out of the fence’s path.
As his first order of business, Nazee would drink five cups of Turkish coffee. The rest of us headed for breakfast—the same menu of olive oil, hummus, zatar, and pita as lunch and dinner. The day’s main activity consisted of waiting for the next group of Israelis to show up. Once they did—usually at four or five in the afternoon—I’d trek back to the bus station at El Kana as settlers shouted insults at me from passing cars. (Once time, some of the anarchists and I hitchhiked back. We were picked up by a family of settlers from Hebron—there was dead silence in the car all the way to the bus stop).
But before then, there were the hours of mind-numbing boredom. We‘d read old information packets about the wall, take naps, make small talk. Ariel—a particularly militant anarchist vegetarian—would annoy me all day long. He would follow me around, raving about how eating animals is murder. Eventually, I had to get my friends to keep him occupied.
The other main activity was observing progress on the construction site. Overseen by a contractor—a fat unsmiling man from Tiberias—and a security guard who stood in the shade of an olive tree wearing a bulletproof vest and holding an M16, the construction inched forward. As the day wore on, we would often hear dynamite—a bellowing boom that shook the ground around us. Other times, it was quiet.
When the fence was completed, it would enclose Mas’ha on two sides. A solitary Palestinian family would be left on the Israeli side of the wall, next to El Kana. The father of this family would only be able to enter Mas’ha twice a day—provided the soldiers were there to stand watch at the gate—to bring his children to school and return with them later in the day.
All of the laborers building the wall were Palestinian. None, as far as I could gather, were from Mas’ha, though a few were from neighboring villages—Zawiye, Ras a Tia, and others. One time, one of the Palestinian workers came up to Nazee during his lunch break. “How can you do this?” Nazee asked him. “I need the money,” the man said. “But I feel like I’m building my own coffin.”
Everyone at the camp said Nazee was going to make me his second wife. Over the months, we had become close, sleeping side by side near the campfire and sharing our worries and jokes. We came to enjoy each other’s company, and he knew he could rely on me to show up when I said I would. That commitment meant a great deal to the Palestinian activists because they knew they needed us to come and that we didn’t need to be there, other than to ease our conscience.
The Palestinians were always at the camp. Only Tayseer and Riziq went home regularly. Tayseer was one of the organizers but lived in another village. His wife had just had a baby. Using the road built for the settlers, it would have taken him half an hour to get there. But Palestinians aren’t allowed to use those roads. Those who try to use them are arrested. So Tayseer had to take a series of cabs, going from village to village, using a chaotic system of access roads—unpaved streets whose upkeep was not overseen by any government. It would take him at least four hours to get home.
Nazee and I watched out for each other. When I was all bitten up from mosquitoes and only had a T-shirt with me, Nazee gave me one of the only two shirts he had with him at the camp. He joked that I must not be accustomed to the Palestinian mosquitoes, which he said were fiercer than Israeli ones. We would discuss our plans for the future; Nazee would tell me of the camp’s effects on his political party, and regale me with repeated renditions of Palestinian jokes.
At first I just thought it was cool that we could be friends—a little triumph for a guilty liberal. I patted myself on the back for befriending a Palestinian. But then I started to ask his other friends about his health, like whether he had eaten anything that day. He would go days and nights without eating and it worried me. There’s a kind of intimacy that only comes from sleeping out in the olive groves together week after week, from sitting in the woods together at night deciding who’s going to keep watch for settlers and the IDF.
Nazee was determined never to drop his macho veneer. Showing weakness to a Jewish woman from Philadelphia would be inconceivable. But one night, as I sat with Nazee and Tayseer in the olive groves, he began railing against Fatah—the dominant Palestinian political faction—for trying to close down the camp, and against his own communist party for not supporting him. The stress was unbearable, Nazee said angrily. Then he began to cry. Only in the camp, where the normal rules governing the Israeli and Palestinian universe ceased to apply, could a man from Mas’ha break down in tears.
“Y’know, I’ve really been thinking that I want a second wife,” Nazee said to me a few weeks later. The women from Black Laundry were scandalized. They all stood there, mouths open. “At home when I wake up in the morning, my wife gets up and makes me coffee,” he explained. “Here there’s no one to do it for me.” “Nazee,” they replied. “You can make your own coffee.”
For weeks, the construction workers had been putting up more and more barbed wire around the camp, penning us in. Villagers from Mas’ha would go and cut the wire, but the construction crews just put up more. As the fence neared completion and more barbed wire went up around us, the camp began to choke to death. People started to come less frequently. It got harder to get them to sign up for the night watch. When I would call and ask other Israeli activists to return, they would tell me they were busy—overloaded at their jobs, studying for tests at school. By early July, we needed to make a decision about our future.
The organizational meeting to discuss the future of the camp was the most chaotic yet. The anarchists wanted us all to cut the wire and climb the fence so that we would be arrested and get lots of media attention. Eventually, we decided to move the camp. It was a last gasp effort to keep the protest going.
At the beginning of August, I left Israel for a vacation in Italy with my mother. On my last trip to the camp before I left, I brought her—a Jewish woman in her mid-forties— to meet all of my friends there. I told them I would be back at the campsite in two weeks.
Ten days later, Hani Amer, a resident of Mas’ha, was told his house would be demolished to make way for the security fence. Everyone at the camp met and decided it would be best to move the camp for a third time to Hani’s back yard. The decision was unanimous—the threat was imminent; everyone knew that going there would put them at higher risk of getting arrested and evacuated, but by this time they had all accepted arrest as inevitable.
On August 5th, everyone with the guts to come gathered in Hani’s yard. The army arrived with four jeeps full of armed soldiers and demanded that everyone disperse. The activists, of course, refused, and the army arrested 46 people—Israelis, Palestinians, and internationals. Ariel—the irritating anarchist—struggled so hard and screamed at the soldiers to “go fuck themselves” so many times that they finally got sick of him. One soldier refused to even walk past his cell.
Word spread to the ac
tivist community that everyone from Mas’ha had been arrested, and the next day 26 Israelis came to protest and were, in turn, arrested. On August 13th, the area was officially declared a closed military zone and the tents were confiscated. Hani was told that if any activists were seen in his yard, the IDF would demolish his house. A few representatives of the Israeli press were contacted, and even fewer came to see for themselves. For the most part, the incident was invisible to mainstream Israeli society. But it would soon prove a turning point for the radical Israeli left.
I feel guilty for not having been there. I had the privilege to be able to fly off to Italy, to arrive at the camp when I wanted and leave freely. It felt as if I had deserted the people I felt needed my support the most. Even though, in practical terms, I knew my presence wouldn’t have made a difference at the end, I wished I had been there with them.
Nazee’s field lies on the other side of the wall. The fence rises up perhaps seven or eight feet into the air, with a video surveillance camera peering down from each concrete section and barbed wire snaking along the top. A private security guard patrols that stretch of the barrier, puffing on a cigarette and toting a Galil rifle over his shoulder. Nazee owes thousands of shekels in loans that he took out to keep the camp alive. And he has seven children to feed. He still owns a greenhouse within Mas’ha, but with his land gone, his livelihood has essentially been demolished.
By March 2004, according to the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem, the Israeli government had expropriated 7,000 acres for the construction of the fence, creating an area of over 200,000 acres of land between the security barrier and the Green Line. But Ariel Sharon and his cabinet may be forced to do some construction they weren’t counting on. Responding to mounting international pressure, Sharon’s government now plans to pull the wall back, closer to the Green Line. A map I saw recently showed the West Bank divided into three cantons, each cut off from Israel by a section of fence. These adjustments won’t mean much to the farmers of Mas’ha, and the new route of the wall will still confiscate a great deal of Palestinian territory. But the changes are a sign that Israel’s government is feeling the heat from the international community, that activism works.
On April 11th, I went to Givat Haviva—an education center run by the peace movement in the northern Sharon Valley—for the third annual Activism Festival. Every year a coalition of Israeli leftist groups organizes the festival to bring radical activists together. Long-haired hippies with multiple piercings smoke pot, naked babies run around in the grass, and activists like me exchange ideas and information. This year more Palestinians attended than ever before. Ta’ayush and Hadash—the Israeli/Arab peace party—led seminars on how to protest against the wall.
Since Camp Mas’ha, a new type of activism has developed. Now, every time there’s a protest in the West Bank, the Palestinians invite the Israelis. They welcome groups like Ta’ayush and Gush Shalom. A relationship is emerging that didn’t exist before, creating new respect for nonviolent protest within Palestinian society.
Now when there’s a demonstration in the occupied territories, Palestinians and Israelis stand together. Now the IDF doesn’t know what to do. If they shoot live rounds into a crowd of protesters they might hit an Israeli, and then there’d be hell to pay.
I finally caught up with Nazee at Givat Haviva’s volunteer station. He was talking to an activist from Gush Shalom, probably explaining where the fence would be heading. Hands folded in front of his chest, he was, of course, smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. When he turned and saw me, his face lit up. He said he had heard I was at the festival and that he had looked for me everywhere. He was talking excitedly, his words running into each other. But he stopped abruptly. Stepping towards me, he peered closely at my face. Then, pointing to a cluster of pimples on my forehead, he asked me if the mosquitoes had been biting again, his mouth breaking into a giant grin.
